CBAM 2027 for buyers of imported castings

Regulatory status as of 22 August 2026. This article is updated quarterly.

If you buy cast metal components from a supplier outside the EEA, you have a little over four months to understand what happens on 1 January 2027.

This article tries to be precise rather than dramatic, for a simple reason: you probably deal with the regulations yourself and will spot exaggeration immediately.

What CBAM is

CBAM stands for Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — the EU mechanism for levelling the carbon cost between goods produced inside and outside the union.

The principle: producers in the EU pay for their emissions through the emissions trading system. An importer buying the same goods from a country without carbon pricing avoids that cost. CBAM closes the gap by requiring the importer to buy certificates corresponding to the emissions embedded in the goods.

Status in the EU

The definitive phase entered into force on 1 January 2026. Until then the scheme was a pure reporting obligation. Now the financial obligations run: importers must purchase and surrender CBAM certificates.

The scheme covers six goods groups: cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen. Aluminium is included.

There is a threshold — 50 tonnes per year. Below it, around 90 per cent of importers fall out of the scheme, while nearly all the emissions are still captured, because the large importers sit well above it.

The certificate price is calculated as a quarterly average during 2026. The first quarter was set at 75.36 euro per tonne of CO₂ equivalent, the second at 75.28 euro. The third quarter price is published in October 2026. From 2027 the calculation moves to weekly averages.

Status in Norway

Norway introduces CBAM from 1 January 2027. The bill has been submitted to parliament. The Norwegian Environment Agency is the competent authority, and Norwegian Customs handles the import side.

The framework mirrors the EU: the same six goods groups, the same 50-tonne threshold.

Norwegian importers above the threshold must register in both a national register and the EU register, document actual embedded emissions or apply default values, buy and surrender certificates, and report.

Goods originating in the EEA, the EU and Switzerland are exempt.

Clarification: castings are not in the current scope

This point is the most important in the whole article, and it is where you should be sceptical of suppliers selling CBAM anxiety.

Finished aluminium castings are not covered by CBAM as the rules stand today. The scope bites on aluminium at earlier stages of the value chain — raw metal and semi-finished products under chapter 76 of the tariff.

If you see a claim that castings are levied under CBAM today, it is not correct.

What is proposed but not adopted

The Commission has proposed extending the scope to around 180 downstream products with a high steel and aluminium content. The average metal share of the products on the list is around 79 per cent. Examples in the proposal include white goods, refrigeration and freezing equipment and parts for them, metal office furniture and prefabricated buildings.

Proposed application is from 2028.

Note two things. This is a proposal in the ordinary legislative procedure and has to pass both the Parliament and the Council. And the product list itself is still subject to negotiation and lobbying — which products end up on it is not settled.

So write proposed, not coming. That applies to us as well.

Why it still matters to you now

Because the main cost is not the certificate price.

A buyer who has to handle CBAM must do the following: register the business in two registers, set up a routine for collecting emissions data from suppliers, assess whether the supplier data is adequate or whether default values must be used, buy certificates, surrender them on time, and document everything in case of an audit.

That is an apparatus. It takes somebody time, and somebody has to own it.

Add that the product list is in motion, and that an extension in 2028 could pull in products you currently consider outside scope. The question is then not what a certificate costs — it is how much administrative risk you are willing to build into your supply chain.

The arithmetic for a Norwegian buyer

Compare two suppliers of the same component, one in Asia and one in Norway:

	Import from a third country	EEA supplier
Registration in two registers	Yes, above threshold	No
Collecting emissions data from the supplier	Yes	No
Buying and surrendering certificates	Yes, above threshold	No
Reporting obligation	Yes	No
Exposure if the scope is extended	Yes	No
Customs clearance on import	Yes	No

The right-hand column is empty. That is the entire point.

What you should do now

1. Establish whether you are above the threshold. 50 tonnes per year of covered goods, in total. If you are below, the financial obligation does not apply — but it is worth knowing how close you sit.

2. Ask your suppliers whether they can provide emissions data. Not whether they will, but whether they actually can. Many cannot, and then you have to use default values, which are consistently unfavourable.

3. Check which of your components are exposed to an extension. If you have a component group with a high metal content, it is a candidate for the downstream list.

4. Take the supplier decision for 2027 series now. Switching to an EEA supplier requires tooling, trials and approval. That takes time, and the time starts now.

Three terms to have straight before you calculate

CBAM — carbon border adjustment mechanism is the name of the scheme itself: a charge on the carbon content of imported goods, introduced to stop European industry being undercut by production with higher emissions outside the EU.

EEA origin is what makes the scheme irrelevant for a component. If the part is made inside the EEA it triggers no CBAM obligation at all. That is not a discount — it is the absence of a regime.

LME — London Metal Exchange is where the aluminium price is set, and it explains why a casting quotation has a shorter validity than you might expect: the price of the part is built on metal weight, and metal weight is priced against the exchange.

What we will not claim

We will not say that CBAM makes Norwegian production cheaper per part. It does not necessarily, and a foreign foundry with a lower hourly rate will still be cheaper on many volume parts.

Nor will we say that castings are levied today. They are not.

What we can say is this: a component cast in Rade is an EEA good. It triggers no CBAM obligation, no registration, no certificate purchase and no emissions reporting for you as the buyer. Whatever happens to the scope in 2028.

That is a predictability argument rather than an environmental one — and for a buyer it is usually the stronger of the two.

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Sources: European Commission (CBAM definitive regime), the Norwegian Environment Agency, Norwegian Customs, the Federation of Norwegian Industries. Certificate prices as published by the Commission on 7 April and 6 July 2026.